Metadata: L. Kh. Vil’sker
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- The National Library of Russia
- Holding institution (official language):
- Российская национальная библиотека. Отдел рукописей.
- Postal address:
- 91069, Russia, St. Petersburg, ul. Sadovaia, д. 18, main building; tel.: (812) 310-28-56; fax: (812) 310-61-48; e-mail: office@nlr.ru http://www.nlr.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 1529
- Title:
- L. Kh. Vil’sker
- Title (official language):
- ВИЛЬСКЕР Л. Х.
- Creator/accumulator:
- L. Kh. Vil’sker
- Date(s):
- 1946/1988
- Language:
- Russian
- Samaritan Aramaic
- Hebrew
- Yiddish
- Arabic
- English
- Spanish; Castilian
- French
- Ukrainian
- Belarusian
- Extent:
- 210 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
The fonds contains a significant set of materials on Jewish history and culture, distributed among the following inventory sections.
The inventory’s first section, “Personal documents and materials pertaining to L. Kh. Vil’sker’s career and research,” contains, in particular, L. Kh. Vil’sker’s Leningrad University diploma; job applications and workplace-related documents; various identification papers; etc. (1946-86); proposals for edited scholarly volumes (1960s); materials pertaining to the defense of his doctoral dissertation (1970); travel notes in Yiddish (1978); etc.
The second section, “Works by L. Kh. Vil’sker and materials pertaining to same,” consists of the following ten subsections:
1) “A description of Samaritan monuments and other works on Samaritan studies”; this contains “Materials toward an unidentified work on Samaritan monuments,” which includes, in particular, information on the Imperial Public Library’s acquisition of “monuments of Samaritan antiquity” from A. S. Firkovich; notes on the cap of a column on Mount Gerizim near the city of Nablus (Shechem); a description of an attestation by Josephus Flavius regarding this column cap; photographs of the curtains used to cover the ark containing the Pentateuch, with depictions of sacred items added in (1960s); “Notes on Samaritan manuscripts from the Firkovich collection” (1960); a report titled “On the scientific significance of the Samaritan collection of the State Public Library,” which among other things gives a description of the catalogue compiled by Abraham Harkavy (1965); etc.; materials for an article titled “An Unknown Page from the History of the Culture of the Ancient East,” on a manuscript volume of the 15th c. from the A. S. Firkovich collection (1969); etc.
2) The second subsection, “Materials pertaining to a description of the manuscript collection of Baron D. G. Gintsburg and E. Apostolidi at the Russian State Library (the V. I. Lenin State Library),” includes “Information on the history and makeup of the Baron Gintsburg manuscript collection,” which contains, in particular, a brief description of several texts of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and of manuscripts by pupils of the well-known sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria (1960); a subject index to the Russian State Library’s collection compiled by L. Kh. Vil’sker (1973); lists and transcriptions of texts from the collection of Baron D. G. Gintsburg (1980); and also a catalogue titled “A Description of parchment Hebrew manuscripts of the E. Apostolidi collection,” which among other materials contains fragments of the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Proverbs, Ezekiel, Ruth, Daniel, Ezra, the Machzor for Yom Kippur and the seventh day of Sukkot, a collection of piyyut for the Simchat Torah holiday, etc. (1971).
3) The third subsection contains “Materials toward a description of Hebrew manuscripts from the collection of A. S. Firkovich and Archimandrite Antonin (A. I. Kapustin) at the National Library of Russia and other depositories.” Among these are “Excerpts from Samaritan, Hebrew, and Karaite manuscripts of the State Public Library, as well as excerpts from the scholarly literature thereon, in Spanish and Russian” (1970-71); an article titled “Unknown Hebrew Manuscripts,” to which is appended a list of Hebrew manuscripts housed at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran) (1978); materials (1980s) toward a description of manuscript collections of A. S. Firkovich, including those that contain texts of works by Judah Halevi; etc.
4) The fourth subsection, “A description of Jewish book fonds (literature in Yiddish and in Hebrew), includes the file “Various materials and extracts for the article ‘Postincanabula,’” which contains excerpts on the medieval Hebrew Bible commentators Saadia Gaon, Moses and David Kimhi, Elia Levita (Elia Bachur; Elia ha-Levi ben Asher Ashkenazi), Rashi, Levi ben Gershon, the Ralbag, and others (1973-78); a survey titled “Early printed books in the North Semitic languages in fonds of the State Public Library’s Department of Literature of the Countries of Asia and Africa” (undated); the manuscript of an article titled “Sketches toward a History of the Formation of the Fonds of Yiddish- and Hebrew-Language Literature at the State Public Library” (1979); “An exhibit of works by Sholom Aleichem. A Catalogue” (1979); etc.
5) The fifth subsection is titled “Studies of monuments of Hebrew literature (on works of the Hebrew poets of Arabic Spain Judah Halevi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and also the medieval Near Eastern Hebrew poets Said ben Babshad and Hadura ben Abraham”; this contains L. Kh. Vil’sker’s study “Said ben Babshad’s Book of Wisdom” (1977); an article with Russian translations of “198 Poems of Judah Halevi” (1983); “Materials on the medieval work of Hebrew literature Yosifon (1978); etc.
6) The sixth subsection, “Studies on the linguistics of the Semitic languages, and materials toward same,” includes, among other things, “Notes on the dictionary of Ia. Pevzner” (undated), which contain a critique of the Russian-Hebrew and Hebrew-Russian dictionaries of the Israeli Semitologist Ia. Pevzner (Tel Aviv, 1956).
7) The seventh subsection, “Translations from the Semitic languages (Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew),” includes, in particular, a file titled “Unpublished translations from the Israeli writers A. Reuveni, R. Vul, and B.-A. Malachi.”
8) The eighth subsection, “Works devoted to an analysis of translations of classic Russian poetry into Hebrew,” includes materials pertaining to translations of works by A. S. Pushkin into Hebrew (1973-84); a typewritten copy of a bibliography titled “Pushkiniana” (in Hebrew, 1981); materials on the history of the translation of works by M. Iu. Lermontov into Hebrew and Yiddish, and on Lermontov’s influence on Hebrew and Yiddish poetry (1984); etc.
9) The ninth subsection, “Popular-scientific works and materials toward same (works on well-known Orientalists, on Jewish writers, translators, and scholars of the 19th-20th c., reviews of Yiddish and Hebrew fiction, etc.),” contains the following files: “Bibliographic materials on the Orientalist I. I. Ravrebe” (1971); “Unknown letters of writers and thinkers” (1975),” which houses a letter from S. M. Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) to Baron G. O. Gintsburg; “Notes on the Israeli translator A. Shlonsky” (1975); manuscripts of the articles “The Vine of Egypt” (1976) on the Cairo Genizah, and “Toward a History of Hebrew Book-Printing (1977); materials on Sholom Aleichem, including a card catalogue of his publications in Yiddish and Hebrew (1979), and translations of his works into various languages (German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, etc.) (1979); bibliographic extracts (1981); a bibliography of the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1987); materials pertaining to an unpublished article titled “Letters of Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik” (1988); etc.
10) The tenth subsection, “Miscellaneous works on Semitology and auxiliary materials for same,” contains documents pertaining to the teaching of Hebrew at Leningrad State University, and the curriculum of a special course in Hebrew for the university’s Eastern Studies department in 1959-60; a review of Instructions on Conveying Israeli Geographical Names (S. P. Malinin; ed. L. I. Rozov, 1967); a description of Hebrew display items – amulets, stamps, decorations, inscribed stones, ritual utensils, etc. – from the private collection of the Leningrad collector S. N. Khanukaev (1968); materials pertaining to the expert analysis of a Torah scroll in the city of Turkistan (Kazakhstan, 1978); copies and a partial translation of inscriptions on Jewish gravestones for an article titled “Medzhibozh Gravestones,” on the grave of the founder of Hasidism Baal Shem Tov (Besht) and others (1971); a review of a chapter of N. I. Zabara’s novel The Wheel that Turns, and of a novel published by Sovetskii pisatel’ (Moscow 1979) in Yiddish with a Russian paraphrase; reviews of works by L. Kh. Vil’sker (1974-83); clippings from Israeli newspapers about Sh. Sheiber, G. Kresel, D. Yarden (1979-86); etc.
The third section, “Materials toward a bibliography,” includes among other materials bibliographies of L. Kh. Vil’sker’s translations from the Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew (1958-66), and materials pertaining to these (1970-79), as well as lists of his works in Samaritan studies (1981) and other scholarly publications for 1974-84.
The fourth section, “Works by other persons,” has materials of various content by researchers in Arabic, Semitic, Samaritan, and Egyptian studies (reviews, evaluations, outlines of lectures, etc.), including V. I. Beliaev (1966), I. N. Vinnikov (1947-48), M. I. Zand (circa 1965), V. V. Lebedev, K. B. Starkova (1979-80), M. B. Piotrovskii (1991), V. V. Struv (1958-61), I. M. Shifman (1965), Rudolf Macuch (1983), Jean-Pierre Rothschild (1982), and in particular, a review of a collection of contemporary Israeli fiction titled The Shadow-Seller [Prodavets teni] (edited by A. M. Belov and L. Kh. Vil’sker; 1965).
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Lev Khaimovich Vil’sker (pseudonym: Leyb Shumskii; 1919-88) was an Orientalist and Semitologist, one of the country’s few specialists in the Samaritan language; a PhD, he was the author of popular-scientific articles on Hebraica and Judaica. In 1950 he graduated from Leningrad University with a specialisation in Semitic linguistics; he was sent to work at the State Public Library, where he worked until 1980, first in the Department of National Literatures, and then in the Department of Literature of the Countries of Asia and Africa (OLSAA). His research interests included Samaritan studies using the A. S. Firkovich collection; and the legacy of the medieval Hebrew poets, including Judah Halevi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Said ben Abraham, Hadura ben Abraham, and others. He was also involved in work toward preserving the Yiddish language and Jewish culture, and in particular, publishing articles in Sovetish Heimland [The Soviet Homeland]. His main works were The Samaritan Language (Moscow, 1974); Samaritan Documents of the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library: A Catalogue (St. Petersburg, 1992); “Unknown Meshalim Mehorazim (Rhyming Parables) or the ‘Sefer Ha-Hohma’ (Book of Wisdom) of Said ben Babshad at the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Leningrad” (in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of A. Scheiber. Budapest; Leiden, 1988); “Said ben Babshad’s Book of Wisdom” (Vostochnyi sbornik no. 4; Leningrad, 1990); Abu al-Faraj’s Book of Entertaining Stories (trans. from the Syriac by A. Belov and L. Vil’sker; Moscow, Leningrad, 1961); and From Ahikar to Dzhano (edited, trans. from the Syriac, and with a commentary by A. Belov and L. Vil’sker; Leningrad, 1960). The archive was donated by Vil’sker’s family in 1990.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Abramovich, S. M.
- Apostolidi, E.
- Baal-Shem-Tov
- Beliaev, V.
- Belov, A. M.
- ben Abraham, Hadura
- ben Babshad, Said
- ben Gershon, Levi
- Firkovich, A.
- Flavius, Josephus
- Gaon, Saadia, Kimhi, Moses
- Gintsburg, D. G.
- Gintsburg, G. O.
- Halevi, Yehuda
- Ibn Gabirol, Solomon
- Kapustin, A. I.
- Khanukaev, S. N.
- Kimhi, David
- Kresel, G.
- Lebedev, V. V.
- Lermontov, M. Iu.
- Levita, Elia
- Luria, Isaac
- Macuch, Rudolf
- Malachi, B.-A.
- Malinin, S. P.
- Mendele Moykher-Sforim
- Pevzner, Ia.
- Piotrovskii, M. B.
- Pushkin, A. S.
- Ralbag
- Rashi
- Ravrebe, I. I.
- Reuveni, A.
- Rothschild, Jean-Pierre
- Rozov, L. I.
- Sheiber, Sh.
- Shifman, I. M.
- Shlonsky, A.
- Sholem Aleichem
- Starkova, K. B.
- Struv, V. V.
- Vil’sker, L. Kh.
- Vinnikov, I. N.
- Vul, R.
- Yarden, D.
- Zabara, N. I.
- Zand, M. I.
- Subject terms:
- Bible
- Cemeteries
- Cemeteries--Gravestones
- Ceremonial objects
- Correspondence
- Diaries
- Education
- Education--Schools and universities
- Genizot
- Hasidic Judaism
- Jewish holidays
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Hebrew
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Kabalah
- Karaite Judaism
- Libraries
- Literature
- Literature--Novels, poetry, and plays
- Literature--Writers, poets, and playwrights
- Manuscripts
- Monuments and memorials
- Newspaper clippings
- Personal records
- Photographs
- Prayer books
- Printing
- Professions
- Professions--Scholars (secular), scientists, and academics
- Torah (scroll)
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes a single inventory systematised by structure.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary